Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 October 2000
When discriminating between unknown foreign languages, infants, young children, and adultlisteners are able to make same-language/different-language discrimination judgments atbetter than chance levels. In these studies (Lorch & Meara, 1989; Mehler et al., 1988;Stockmal, 1995), foreign language samples have often been provided by different talkers,confounding voice characteristics and language characteristics. In Experiments 1 and 2, using thesame talkers for different pairs of languages, we found that listeners were able to discriminatebetween languages they did not know, even when spoken by the same talker. That is, listenerswere able to separate talker from language characteristics. Experiment 3 used multidimensionalscaling to explore the bases of listener judgments. Listeners were attentive to prosodic propertiesand influenced by their familiarity with the test languages.